The Effects of Personally Adapted Monologue Memorization on Iranian EFLLearners’ Oral Proficiency, Accuracy and Fluency

This study investigates the influence of using Personally Adapted Monologue Memorization(PAMM) procedure on Iranian EFL learners’ oral proficiency and two of its components (i.e.,accuracy and fluency).Thirty Iranian eight grade secondary school students were randomlydivided into one experimental group (EG) and one control group (CG) who were proved to behomogeneous in terms of general English proficiency of Nelson test (100 A) (Fowler & Coe,1976, p.22) prior to the treatment. These students were 15 in each group. The EG received thetreatment, which was PAMM instruction and the CG received the ordinary practice of speakingEnglish. The students in the EG were to personally adapt each monologue and memorize it forthe next session, then they were asked to talk accordingly. The materials for this study consistedof three samples of monologues for each topic, 10 topics in all, which were provided according tothe students’ votes to list of topics with the highest frequency. The treatment was run for 12sessions, one school semester for 4 months, and at the end of the experiment, all the subjectswere given the same oral interview test as the post-test. We conducted a pre/post interview testin which individual performances were separately tape-recorded and later transcribed and scoredby two raters (inter-rater reliability) to measure oral proficiency and two of its components (i.e.,accuracy and fluency) according to Ur’s oral testing (1996, p 135). Multivariate analysis ofvariance were used to check the hypotheses. Results showed that PAMM instruction led tosignificantly superior performance in EG across all dependent variables. Meanwhile, the effectwas greater in the case of fluency than accuracy. This study verified the importance of PAMMinstruction as an effective way to achieve a good command of speaking skill

کلیدواژه ها:

PAMM ، Oral proficiency ، Accuracy ، Fluency